Adding a "Feedback & Support" category

I’d like to:

  • Create a “Feedback & Support” category at the top level.
    Goal: encourage people to give feedback

    Having to figure out where to give feedback is a barrier to actually doing it.
    Right now, there’s no clear place: Design? General Discussion? Support? :confused:

    Putting it as a top level category makes sure people will see it and suggests that they should leave feedback.

    Rationale for a combining feedback and support into one category

    A lot of the time, feedback becomes support, or vice versa (“How do I…?” is not far from “I wish I could…”). One category will hopefully avoid causing confusion.

    I’m totally open to different opinions on this, though.


  • Create sub-categories: Website and Forum
    • We’ll probably add more later.

  • Remove the sub-categories of Meta and move their posts to other categories
    Forum

    Most posts are either feedback (“Discourse should do…”), support (“How do I…?”), or setup. I think setup posts actually belong in the Outreach category, since they’re about the specific work of setting up Discourse.

    This would also address an outstanding tension of mine: mixing concrete, actionable work with just-discussion threads.

    Wiki

    There’s only one post, which is kind of shoe-horned in there. It’s actually about communication goals for the limit, which happens to have a related wiki page.

    If it’s valuable to identify posts with related wiki content, we could use a sub-category or tag for this inside General discussion. If someone wants to discuss the specific work of updating the text on a wiki page, they can post in Outreach.

    Support

    These would go to Feedback & Support, obviously.

    Note: The meta category could stay

    It would be for actual meta-discussions, about the way we communicate on Discourse, or to give people feedback on their communication in specific posts (if there’s merit in having those publicly).

    So far I’m not convinced that we’ll actually have many of these, but I don’t see the harm in leaving the category around. We can always remove it later.


@msiep I mentioned this briefly to @wolftune and he suggested I get your input (as our local feedback-gathering expert) on the UX of this setup.

I suppose I should ping @Salt too, although I know he’s in favor of adding a Feedback category somewhere.

reminder: click these to expand

Tada! Inner text.

I’ve gone ahead and done most of this. We decided not to delete the wiki category (immediately, at least) and to make Meta-discussion a sub-category of Feedback & Support. I’ve moved most of the topics, although there’s probably still a couple which are in the wrong categories.

Happy to clean them up as we run across topics that seem like they’re in the wrong categories instead of all at once now. And honestly, if we don’t come back to it later, it doesn’t matter that much which category a given topic is in.